KAUKO!

Special thanks to Elliot Blakely.

Jouko Ahola: Intergalactic Bounty Hunter

Speaking of crowd-sourced films, check out this slick promo for Jeremiah Harm. That's my friend Jouko swaggering around like a Schwarzeneggerian badass. He was recruited to play the worlds-weary alien hunter in this concept piece for Timo Vuorensola's follow-up to Iron Sky. (Who knew Finland could produce visual effects like this?)

There's no word yet on whether Jouko will have a role in the film itself, but he's been keeping busy. Next year he'll appear in several episodes of the History Channel's Vikings television series, playing the Finnish warrior Kauko. Considering that Jouko's performance in Kingdom of Heaven was one of the inspirations for my own Viking script, you can bet I'll be watching.

Fullsterkur 2: Halfway to Alexandria

Please welcome Zack, our guest blogger today. Below he provides his account of our recent trip to the World’s Strongest Man Super Series in Madison Square Garden. Please excuse the title, however. I had lobbied for a simple “The Strongman and the Kid, Part 2,” citing the precedent set by the highly successful “You Are Burning Me” trilogy. I tried to reason with him, pointing out the long lineage of elegant titles whose company his would join. But Zack was set on drawing out the Durrellian elements of the experience while maintaining a measure of total badassness. What can you do?

. . . . .

When I went to the Strong Man Competition in New York , I didn’t know what to expect. One thing I can say, though, is that the competitors were a lot bigger than I thought they would be.

When we got there I was anxious to see these guys. Then Jouko Ahola showed up with another man [Phil Pfister]. Jouko was really big, but nothing compared to the other man. We all shook hands and then Ryan proceeded to talk to the other men. Eventually, Jouko left to go talk to some of the competitors. Then he walked over to another group of gigantic men. He looked small among them.

After that we went to Madison Square Garden to watch them set up for the competition. They had giant tires, coffin-shaped weights, and other gigantic lifting objects. My first impression was that all the men would be very stern, but surprisingly some of them had great senses of humor. After watching them practice for a while we went and had lunch.

Later on we went to the competition. It was amazing how radical some of the people there were. Also, at least 40% of the people there were Poles who didn’t speak a word of English. The competition was awesome. These men were so unbelievably strong! It was like no competition I’d ever seen.

The Strongman and the Kid

For as long as I can remember I've been fascinated by strength. When I was little, I knew my father was strong, with biceps like baseballs, and there was something awesome about this to me. He lifted weights in the garage, ran at the junior high track, and did his Army calisthenics routine on the backyard swing set he had built out of thick pipes. These things were all part of being a father, my father, and I wanted to be like him. When I was old enough I followed his ways, and he taught me how.

But I was naturally small, very small, and I felt my difference, my invisibility. Running cross-country and track taught me how to work hard, and to like it, but only amplified the inherited ectomorphic situation. Chronic overuse injuries from running allowed the weight training I was already doing to actually work, and eventually I traded one obsessive-compulsive regime for another.

But disciplines have a way of working on you when you do the work they demand. You can’t hold out forever, and eventually what was rooted in anxiety and adolescent fantasy grew into a method of knowing something of myself. Little by little I became more process-oriented in my gym pursuits, less concerned with the minutiae of routines and macronutrient ratios. This process took another big step forward when, several months ago, I began training 13-year-old Zack, the son of one of Jenifer’s yoga clients. “The Kid” is naturally big, very big, and feels his difference, his conspicuousness. We hit it off very well, and supervising his workouts while conducting my own necessarily took much of the focus off myself. And that’s a good thing.

I was really pleased, then, to be able to invite him to a strongman competition, the World’s Strongest Man Super Series. It was to be held in Madison Square Garden and my friend Jouko would be there as a referee. Perfect.

With the Kid working his GPS, I got us through the Lincoln Tunnel just fine, though in the jam leading up to it the Prius’s energy level had dropped down to purple. I tried not to sweat it, but to be honest I still haven’t read the manual and I didn’t know what would happen if even the two remaining purple bars disappeared from the screen: either the car would stop dead in its tracks and the Kid and I would be at the front end of an impromptu anaerobic training session all the way to the Hotel Pennsylvania, or a cadre of Homeland Security agents would descend from the sky and whisk us into an underground vault beneath the New Jersey Turnpike, where we would be debriefed on a new revision to the Threat Advisory System.

We ran into Jouko in the lobby of the Hotel. His hair was long, his beard unruly, and he looked every bit a Finnish Jesus. He noted that I was not the first person to mention this, and I knew that the disguise was in preparation for his upcoming role as a washed-up Olympic wrestler in Álvaro Brechner’s Bad Day to Go Fishing, based on the short story “Jacob and the Other” by Juan Carlos Onetti. With Jouko was the great Phil Pfister, 2006 World’s Strongest Man and at 6’6” and 375 pounds quite possibly the largest human I have ever met. Shaking his hand was like being enveloped in a gauntlet of bear flesh, and a tremendous honor.

The show wouldn’t start until 7 pm, so the Kid and I hung out in the WaMu Theater as Jouko and Phil (one of the emcees) and the competitors prepared for the show. It seemed to me that these strongmen, each physically exceptional, were more a band of brothers, chieftains from far-flung districts, than a disjointed collection of adversaries. Running the whole affair was the affable, energetic producer, Colin Bryce, who was also once an Olympic bobsleigher.

Jouko is quiet by nature, but here he was in his element, among friends, and it was clear that he was held in high esteem. (Later, while ordering dinner in an archetypical New York deli, Phil turned to me and said simply, “He’s a good guy.”) Even though Jouko retired from competition years ago, this event in particular held special meaning for him. The last time Madison Square Garden hosted a strongman competition, one of the competitors was the Polish strongman Siegmund (Zishe) Breitbart, whom Jouko portrayed in Werner Herzog’s Invincible.

If you’ve ever seen a strongman event on TV, you know that these guys do some pretty crazy stuff: pressing logs overhead, pulling tractor trailers, carrying cars. Stuff that takes a little more oomph than squeaking out one more rep on your triceps kickbacks. The competition began with the Power Medley, or Flip & Carry, in which each man flips a 900-pound tire four or five times, and then hauls a 385-pound weight 50 feet to the finish line.

The next event was probably the most exciting, perhaps because it reminded me of a sick version of Musical Chairs; only there’s no music, you don’t ever get to sit down, and you’re pulling some monster poundages. Enter the Last Man Standing Deadlift, wherein each contestant takes a turn deadlifting a barbell that gets heavier with each round. Jouko pointed out that an Olympic bar, which is more flexible than a powerlifting bar, was being used because it was more dramatic for television (the event—edited down to about 43 minutes—will be broadcast on FOX Sports later this year). Starting weight was 320 kilograms; the last man standing pulled 405 kg, nearly 900 pounds.

Two other highlights included the Húsafell Stone Carry and the Axle Lift. The Húsafell Stone takes its name from an Icelandic testing stone: Snorri Björnsson, an Icelandic pastor and playwright, used the 418-pound, triangle-shaped stone as a gate to his goat pen (by Björnsson’s day, Iceland was pretty much short on wood). If you could lift the stone and carry it the 50 meters around the pen, you achieved fullsterkur, or “fully strong” status. The Axle Lift demands that you clean an axle—complete with oversized tires—to your shoulders and then press it. You do that as many times as you can in a minute. Before the show, I could hardly get my hands around the axle and was humbled to learn that it weighed 135 kg, about what I deadlifted in Jouko's gym in Hämenlinna.

It was easy to caught up in the excitement, and while we may not have been as vocal and persistent as the astonishing number of Polish-Americans fans (cheering on Jarek Dymek), the Kid and I were both thrilled by the performances, the camaderie, and the satisfaction of a full day. At one point the Kid told me he felt better about himself after seeing all these big men. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience for him.

Afterwards, feeling like zombies, we said our farewells to Jouko, escaped the streets of New York, and made our way home again on the New Jersey turnpike feeling a little grander: a little less invisible, a little less conspicuous; somewhere, perhaps, between awkwardness and fullsterkur.

He'll Be Back: Jouko Gets the "And"

One of the things Jenifer and I like to do when watching movies or TV is to look for the "and." I don't know when or how this started, but we always check to see which actor is listed following the initial group of core actors, and introduced by "and." We're usually not crazy fans about any actors in particular -- excepting Jenifer's, um, "respect" for Keanu and my healthy appreciation for, say, Jennifer Garner. But we like to follow various quirky or rising performers; the solid, stealth performers; the David Morses of the acting world.

I noticed that Mark Wahlberg recently got the "and" in Martin Scorsese's latest offering, The Departed. He's probably not at the "level" of folks like Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, or Leonardo DiCaprio, so an "and" in a film of this magnitude is probably quite a good thing for his career. I haven't seen the film, but I'm betting that his character plays a clutch function, even if the role is shorter than those of the main characters. On The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, you have an elaborate credit listing that concludes with "Featuring Sean Bean and Ian Holm with Andy Serkis." Their characters all play smaller, key roles that inhabit significant turning points in the story.

So we were happy to see that our buddy Jouko Ahola got the "and" (or "och" in Swedish) for his latest film, the comedy 7 miljonärer, which premiered in Stockholm last week. Our favorite singing Finn plays Jerry, a fellow with a Terminator complex (no, they're not all like that). At a summer wedding held at a manor house, guests both invited and uninvited scheme to rob the wedding couple of their millions. By the looks of the photo above, I'd guess that Jouko's Jerry takes things a bit too far. You can see the trailer here.

Excellent Style

Greetings from Ribe, Denmark's oldest town. We got to Copenhagen from Helsinki yesterday morning, and then took a train to this sleepy tourist town near the west coast of Jutland. Tip: get reserved seats, or you'll find yourself standing in the space between cars for the first three-and-a-half hours.

Today we saw the middling Ribe Vikinges Museum and the excellent Ribe Viking Center. The museum wasn't up to the standard set by the Historical Museum in Stockholm, but then its collection of artifacts is far smaller. The center was a recreation of Ribe from 750 CE on, and is a fine example of how to do things in a decidely non-commercial, non-cheesy way. The falconry demonstration especially was excellent.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. On Tuesday I worked out with Jouko. Now, I lift heavy and am pretty good in a few movements, but heavy is relative and I knew there would be nothing I could do to impress this guy, who set a world record in Atlas stone lifting. Of course, I had nothing to prove, but I also hadn't hit the gym in a couple weeks.

We started with deadlifts. I was excited to do this movement, but also a little apprehensive since I hadn't done proper deads in several years and for some reason my back had been bothering me every now and again during the trip. We used Jouko's special Chinese bar, which he actually uses as the strongman in Invincible. We did several warmup sets, and my back seemed fine. Jouko did his top set with well over 200 kg for 10 reps, and at the top of each rep he sang the number in Finnish. Hilarious. I ended up pulling 140 kg for five reps. Jouko said I could have done another 40 kg, which is probably true, but I was happy to keep something in the tank and not stagger through the rest of my trip crippled. And Jouko said, "You have excellent style." I was pretty pleased, since it's not every day you hear that from someone who's pulled 435 kg for a single.

The rest of the workout was pretty straightforward: two or three sets of pulldowns, rows, overhead presses, tricep pushdowns, and curls. All machines or cables, which was interesting since I usually do free weights. I'm still pretty sore.

I was honored to lift with Jouko, and afterwards I realized that this was our version of golf.

The computer is about to shut down -- so I'll catch up in Copenhagen.

Helsinki to Hämeenlinna

We found ourselves with an extra day in Helsinki, and we used it well. We started at the National Museum, where we saw Akseli Gallen-Kallela's triumphant final work, frescoes from the Kalevala inside the building's dome. Stunning, inspiring works.

We then hit the tourist office to get information on a harbor cruise, bought our tickets at the nearby waterfront market, and enjoyed lunch at Aino. Jen had an amazing nettle soup and goat cheese salad; I had the salad, grilled whitefish, and a remarkable beer by the name of Strongbow (or Cúthalion as we say in Sindarin). Afterwards we walked along the promenade and got what we've come to call charcoal ice cream. It's dark grey stuff based on a popular candy here in Finland that's similar to licorice. I'd spell it for you, but then I'd exhaust my allotment of vowels for the post. We sat for a long while in the square by Stockmann's until it was time to head to the water.














The harbor cruise through the archipelago was a splendid way to spend an evening. You might even say "romantic." A fine dinner, beautiful weather, and island after island filled with charming summer homes, most of which had little sauna houses by the water.

The next morning we were picked up by our guide to Hämeenlinna, Jouko Ahola, who drove us the hour to his hometown. Jouko was the World's Strongest Man in 1997 and 1999 and has starred in Werner Herzog's Invincible and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. His next film, 7 Millionaires, premieres in Sweden in September.














Jouko drove us around his town and showed us why Hämeenlinna is the "town of parks." Finland is a lush country and public parks are a top priority in cities. One we drove through even has some old-growth forest remaining, though much of it was destroyed in a fierce wind storm. After lunch, Jouko went off to attend to his housebuilding business, and Jenifer and I toured Häme fortress and the adjacent prison museum. Oddly, neither were as creepy as one might expect. Later in the afternoon I joined Jouko for a workout in his gym. That experience was a true privilege and deserves a post of its own.